Online and On Death Row: Historicizing Newspapers in Crisis

During the Leveson Inquiry, supporters of newspaper regulation underpinned by statute deployed a radical account of newspaper history to undermine the liberal consensus that newspapers should not be regulated by parliament. The radical narrative helped them to overlook the distinctive nature of British democracy that makes statutory underpinning uniquely contentious here. But does radical media history deserve such influence? Case studies analysing newspaper content in the twentieth century suggest that it deserves intense criticism and constant challenge.